Communication by e-mail has become increasingly important with the growth of the Internet and other communication networks and the widespread use of information terminals, including personal computers. As a result, e-mail systems continue to become an important social infrastructure, and not simply a business tool.
E-mail is used as the above-mentioned business tool as well as for personal use. Therefore, an e-mail user may often send e-mail containing the same contents to a number of recipients. In addition, it is commonplace that a user sends e-mail to a number of recipients on a regular basis. There exists a common usage pattern in which certain e-mail is distributed (broadcasted) to a number of fixed recipients on a regular basis.
In order to support such a usage pattern, the recipients of e-mail are often grouped. That is, the e-mail user groups and registers a plurality of e-mail addresses into a list and can then select the listed group as the recipient of the e-mail, thereby eliminating the need to select the plurality of e-mail addresses individually.
The e-mail addresses grouped and registered by the e-mail user into a list can change. A specific example of this will be described with respect to usage of e-mail in a company. For example, a certain employee may utilize e-mail to report the progress of his/her activity in a certain time period to a plurality of other employees. The employee who reports the progress is called the “sender” and the employees who receive the report are called “recipients” herein. Personnel changes, including changes in responsibility, may occur quite often in the company. Therefore, the intended recipients may change according to the personnel changes. Because information about the personnel changes is typically provided to the employees of the company, the sender can know the information on his/her own to individually change the e-mail addresses registered by him/her.
However, it is not necessarily easy for the sender to know all the personnel changes without fail. It is especially difficult if the scale of the company is large because the number of the recipients may be as large as several hundred. As a result, employees who should no longer receive an e-mail message may receive it or employees who should receive the e-mail message may not receive it. If this occurs, quick business activities using information technology would not be ensured. Furthermore, even if the sender knows all the personal changes, the large number of recipients may burden the sender with update tasks such as the addition and deletion of the recipients. For example, every member of a project team in a company can be a sender. In that case, each individual sender updates e-mail addresses. Such update tasks are undesirable for the efficiency of business activities in the company.
The e-mail addresses update tasks described above with respect to in-company e-mail by way of example are not limited to a company. They can generally occur in anywhere e-mail is used.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an e-mail system capable of reducing the burden of updating a list of e-mail addresses. It is another object of the present invention to provide a method of updating an e-mail recipient address list that allows such updates. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a computer apparatus that is useful with respect to such an e-mail system and for performing the e-mail recipient address list updating method.